Let’s not beat around the bush: for better and worse, the first episode of Chainsmoker Cat is downright vile. While viewers may go into this series expecting another lighthearted hobby anime about the joys of nicotine — Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You is great, but it might as well have been bankrolled by Big Tobacco — this premiere is a spiraling descent into cat girl depravity. It’s gross, weird, and seems to know what it’s doing with heavy themes about addiction, until overly broad slapstick humor flies in like a car crash. The result is a bit of a mess, but a fascinating one.
This story begins as our titular chainsmoker cat, Yaniko (Yūko Natsuyoshi), takes a long drag on her balcony. She exhales a billowing cloud as the camera match cuts to a dandelion being blown apart, its seeds carried by the wind before falling like fresh snow. And then a bunch of nasty stuff goes down.
From these first moments, it’s clear that this is a very well-produced episode of television. The team at Bibury Animation Studios (Witch Watch; The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You) renders the minute details of motion with care, playing out Yaniko’s repetitive existence as she taps the smoldering ash from another cigarette and brings it to her lips in a languid but practiced motion.
These specifics are painstakingly realized, calling to mind Kyoto Animation’s love of using mundanity to heighten ensuing bedlam, like they’ve done with Nichijou or City: The Animation. While on the one hand, it’s a bit ridiculous that so much artistic effort went into this show’s gross nonsense — kind of like if Caravaggio took his time perfecting the chiaroscuro of a steaming turd — director Taku Kimura’s decision to hone in on uncomfortable particulars is kind of the point.
The thing about Yaniko is that she’s the kind of hot mess that you rarely see in anime (or fiction writ large), mostly because this kind of dysfunction is difficult to watch. Her apartment is a disaster zone caked with cigarette ash and full of leaking garbage bags, an obvious shorthand for how she hasn’t been taking care of her living space or herself. But even more than that, we see that her addiction to smoking has made her fundamentally incapable of living a regular life.
Low on money, she takes a temp job for “anthros” — as an aside, there’s a truly wild implication that this setting is built on anti-cat girl discrimination and wage slavery — but finds herself incapable of making it through her eight-hour shift due to the pains of nicotine withdrawal. While there’s a bit of Looney Tunes humor when she skips work to exhale a cartoon smoke cloud at the nearby convenience store, before long, she is in actual poverty, spending her few remaining yen on tobacco instead of food or water. “Why is my willpower so shit?” she screams as tears run down her whiskers.
The tone goes from raw to outright harrowing, and the most humanizing scene of the whole premiere comes when Yaniko tries to do something as simple as clean her room before becoming so overwhelmed by invasive thoughts and stress that she throws up on the floor. Later, she has an anxiety dream that’s both funny and deeply sad, tapping into her guilt about disappointing her sister (who actually has her life together). She very much needs a helping hand.
However, what makes the series so thoroughly confusing is that while Takashi Aoshima’s script (adapted from NyanNyanFactory’s manga) taps into a sense of desperation that humanizes (uh, cat girl-izes?) Yaniko, this premiere is also a literal shit post. Toilet humor and lowest common denominator otaku fanservice abound: the literal first minute of the episode includes judiciously animated side boob, masturbation, and diarrhea, all in rapid sequence. From here, there are many, many more poop jokes that just sort of stink.
The problem is that most of these attempts at shock humor don’t work nearly as well as its quieter moments of absurdity (like Yaniko letting out small “nyas” of despair while working in a factory), which is unfortunate because this debut goes for more big swings than understated gags.
To be clear, it’s not that Chainsmoker Cat would be better if it were unrelentingly morose, beating you over the head with its anti-drug PSA messaging like Darren Aronofsky. The problem is that the show just gets too zany, slingshotting past Trainspotting (which it references in a banger opening that makes more film homages than Chainsaw Man) into goofy internet humor territory. There’s a place for stories with heavy subject matter that are also gross and unserious, but this episode gets a bit too high on its own supply.
Hopefully, the series will find a better tonal balance going forward, leaning into the implied hangout sessions with other down-on-their-luck cat girls, as these trainwrecks get their lives a bit more on the rails. Or maybe it will just be a bunch more poop jokes. Given this premiere’s zig-zagging priorities, anything is possible.
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